Lestrades_Game

I've done a bit more mapping recently. My friends and sometime game opponents Pete and Matt are running a Megagame on Case Blue in June (see flyer below). I gone done them a map for it. 20km hexes over large swathes of southern Russia. This one was surprisingly quick, think I've spent about 5 hours and its 80% done. I need to do the Georgia area, and the area east of the Don as these were not covered in the source map I raided. The main challenge was projection. I used a google maps screen shot Pete provided as my base map for getting things in the right place, but given the size of the earth being mapped this leads to some distortion. All maps project a spherical bumpy world on to a 2 dimension flat surface, as such you cannot keep all things in perfect proportion. My map distorts the coast a bit different to say Mark Simonitch's map for the up coming Stalingrad 44 game. Most things look pretty good but If you measured the exact distance between the Don and Volga it ...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B39t62uIctG3SHVBQXZwZmc3Q3M/view?usp=sharing I'm putting together some mapping tutorials for the Pennine Megagamers. Here a link to the first pdf.

My world building with Gimp continues. I've had a couple of cracks at putting together a city map and now having something that will probably get into my campaign. It is still a work in progress but it at least looks interesting. The concept is to have a city built on the back of a giant crab. This has some novelty to it, evokes the weird fantasy vibe im shooting for and allows for lots of interesting rationals in the world detail. For instance the city has a massive rain collection system to generate the needed water. To put this together I got a photo of some spiny species of crab, used the magic wand to select everything non crab in the image and remove it. I then dragged the contrast way up and darkened the crab to get a silhouette of the crab. I then used the path tool to design in the roads and then the buildings. I added in some of the spines in grey as these will be hollowed out to form some of the bigger buildings in the city. The background is a bi...

Making good maps is an easy way for someone with little to know art talent like me to make ones adventures look good, and perhaps even publishable (Will send some to fanzines at some point).  I've been steadily learning the ropes with GIMP. This is a bath house I'm constructing for my current Astonishing Swords and Sorcerers of Hyperborea game. I need to create a good pattern fill for the pools, and probably design some more objects to give the map a more populated feel but the structure is there. I very loosely model it on some historical floor plans;